They need to develop better DRM. The new Pokemon games had a very interesting and effective DRM system in that when a pirate dumped the game pack into a ROM image, the game would allow you to play it, but it would no longer reward EXP to pokemon at all (that was their piracy technology). Very effective.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------Your bitterness, I will dispel

They need to develop better DRM. The new Pokemon games had a very interesting and effective DRM system in that when a pirate dumped the game pack into a ROM image, the game would allow you to play it, but it would no longer reward EXP to pokemon at all (that was their piracy technology). Very effective.

exactly. coming up with better DRM protection is a more feasible solution to piracy rather than capping net usage. capping net usage in my opinion is inhuman.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------"Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't"

They (Congress) know damn well it has nothing to do with piracy, but with a forty year old infrastructure that cannot handle even what it's asked to right now--much less in the near future.

However, it is easier for providers to cap their usage to discourage casual users than to address the fundamental issue; which is insufficient network capacity by all of these ISP's that have oversold themselves.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'

This little push by the copyright bodies on ISP's has forced ISP's to cheat a bit and not upgrade any UBR's to cope with oversubscription in area's. And they in turn blame it on the constant heavy users on poor performance, when a year before + it was stable enough.

They just got greedy like Virginmedia in the UK and tried to get everyone on board quickly with a big "to hell with consequences".. To them it was better to try and get £1B per month revenue than spending a couple hundred million to fix up UBR's to cope.

And to show you their greediness VM only allocated £40m for the whole of the UK in upgrades which is just not good enough, so I suspect its pretty much the same worldwide, except Sweden and Japan who have the best networking in place.

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This report also reveals that AT&T's profit margin (before their new-fangled cap) was about 90%.

If they're making that much money, they can spare some to upgrade their 'overburdened' networks, which actually aren't.

[Edited by AdmiralThrawn, 3/16/2011 7:39:46 PM]

Firstly, why would they spend the money, regardless? It is counter-intuitive when they can make more money without spending any.

Secondly, the Stop the Cap blog you posted is arguing more on my side than against me.

"evidence continues to arrive illustrating the company’s planned usage limits are more about protecting their U-verse video business than actually controlling “heavy users.”"

They are working with what is known to be a finite asset, and are giving priority to their own product lest competing products use more of their finite asset.

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Thirdly, you can argue that there is no endemic bandwidth shortage at all in the US--because we have vast untapped resources--but that's merely an exercise in sophistry; an untapped resource may as well not exist for the effect it has.

It's a meaningless argument, because for the consumer there is most definitely a shortage.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'

Giving unlimited internet access sounds extremely hard to me considering ISPs would run out of bandwidth if overused. Eventhough I'm on unlimited plan, my ISP is still secretly doing some capping whenever I reach my limit. It's not stated anywhere in their policy but they protect them self under "Fair Usage Policy" which give people hard to deal with.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------~ Change takes time, not at that time ~